1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a nail print apparatus and a printing control method. Specifically, the present invention relates to a nail print apparatus and a printing control method which uses a nail region extracting model when specifying the nail region on which printing is performed.
2. Description of the Related Art
A nail print apparatus is a print apparatus where a finger of a nail to be printed is positioned on a finger placement stage provided on an apparatus main body and an image including color and patterns is printed using a printing head of an ink jet method on the nail of the positioned finger. With such nail print apparatus, the region of the nail of the finger (hereinafter referred to as “nail region”) needs to be detected accurately in order to specify the printing position and the printing range.
Conventionally, there is provided a method to image a finger image and to process the obtained finger image to recognize the region corresponding to the nail in order to determine the boundary between the nail region and the portion other than the nail region (in other words, the outline of the nail) to recognize the nail region. Such nail print apparatus is described in, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2003-534083.
If the nail region can be extracted automatically from the finger image, the burden of input by the user can be kept to a minimum and the nail region as the print target can be automatically detected to perform printing.
However, actually, the optical properties of the nail and the skin are very close, and include the same color information. Moreover, the color of the nail and the skin is different according to each individual. Therefore, it is not easy to accurately extract the nail region by simply processing the finger image.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2003-534083 merely describes the finger image is analyzed by the impression of the finger, and does not describe a specific method to extract and to specify the nail region accurately. Therefore, it is difficult to extract and to specify the nail region accurately from only the technique disclosed in the document.
As a specific method to extract and to specify the nail region by analyzing the image, a model nail image can be fit in a finger image of the user and the position and the range of the nail can be specified.
However, unlike extracting parts of a face, etc. where a position of each part is roughly fixed, there is no standard for fitting a nail when the nail region is extracted and specified. Therefore, it is difficult to fit a model nail image in a suitable position of the user finger image.
Moreover, the size and position of the nail greatly differs according to sex (male or female), physique (fat, thin, etc.), age (adult or child), and the like, and the shape of the nail is also different depending on the person. Therefore, a model which matches the sex, physique, etc. of the user needs to be used when the nail region is extracted and specified using the nail image model. However, in such case, the user needs to input information such as sex, physique, etc. which complicates the operation of the nail print apparatus and is a burden to the user.